UK Open Riichi 2012 Report

Apparently nothing can stop Nicolas Campina from placing top 10 every single tournament he enters, congratulations on winning the UK Open! The new UK champion is the British player Alex Horsman who placed fourth.

The tournament attracted 52 players from across the Europe for five han-chan sessions and the tournament was played in good spirits on the 30th of June.

For me the tournament started really slow and for the first two sessions it felt that I was just a bystander! I wasn’t able to form any hands but I didn’t play into any either. Even after two sessions it was really clear who probably was going to win, somebody had over 120 000 points at that point thanks to the new uma-rule from EMA which grants table winner +30 000 rather than the old +9000. Now if we only got rid of the red fives and allow open all simples.

Third session was the turning point of my game where I got devastated after declaring riichi and dealing ippatsu into a closed wait chasing riichi worth 12000 points. After that the poker term “steaming” would be spot on to describe my playing style and I suffered more losses thanks to that. Fourth session was quite uneventful and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it to podium so the fifth session I played quite carefree but managed to gain first place and score over +70 000 and made it to 10th place. For me the lesson seems to be to control my play after a setback and learn that the force I slam the tiles onto the table won’t make the discard any safer.

I’d like to thank the UK Mahjong Association for organizing a really good tournament and I hope to see you next year!